Counting Up, Counting Down

by Harry Turtledove

  Deep in her throat, Janice made a noise that would have seemed better suited to the killing beasts that haunted the jungles of Reverence. “Better it would have been you,” she ground out. “You deserve to be extinct. We’re going to try to figure out a way to keep the Haldols going without their vermin, but God—and I don’t mean yours—only knows if we’ll be able to do it before all their females get too old to breed. With a research budget that just about keeps us in paper clips, it won’t be easy.”

  “I will pray for you and the Haldols both, you for delivery from your false idol of technology, and them for being delivered from the affliction it has brought.” Victoria shut her eyes to do just that. She slid into the near-trance state that marked true communion with God. In it, she was only dimly aware of Janice stomping away, of the aircar whooshing out of New Zion, of the gasps from some of the more impressionable folk there at the sight of that marvel.

  When at last she came back to herself, Cornelia Baker was standing in front of her. The other woman helped her to her feet, brushed at her dress to get out the mark of the dirt in which she’d knelt. “You drove them away, Victoria,” Cornelia said. “How ever did you do that?”

  It was, Victoria thought, the first time in her life that she’d succeeded in impressing Cornelia Baker. “I told them the Lord’s truth, Cornelia,” she answered proudly.

  “Was she—the slut, I mean—was she talking with you about the Haldols’—their—their—” Cornelia Baker was the boldest woman in New Zion. Not even she could make herself discuss prurient matters straight on.

  Victoria understood her well enough. “Her name is Janice. Yes, we talked about that.” What the Haldols did, she thought, was so vile it made the way of man and woman, squalid as that was, seem perfection and purity beside it. “She says they’ll probably die out after this generation, and leave the whole world of Reverence to us.”

  “Oh.” Cornelia thought about that. “Where will we get our pots, then?”

  “It won’t happen tomorrow,” Victoria assured her. “Our great-grandparents knew how. I expect we’ll have time to learn again. It’s just what I told Janice—the Lord will provide. He always has.”

  Cornelia Baker nodded confidently. “Amen,” she said.

  Ils ne passeront pas

  One thing the twentieth century taught us was that man could be inhuman to his fellow man on a scale previously unimagined. It’s not the only lesson we take from those hundred crowded years, but it’s one of the big ones. Set alongside what the French and Germans really were doing to one another at Verdun in 1916, St. John the Divine’s vision of the Apocalypse all of a sudden isn’t so much of a much.

  * * *

  As the sun rose from the direction of Germany, Sergeant Pierre Barrès rolled out from under his filthy, lousy blanket. His horizon bleu uniform was equally lousy, which he loathed, and equally filthy, which he minded not at all, for it made him a harder target for the Boche.

  He yawned, rubbed his eyes, scratched his chin. Whiskers rasped under his fingers. When had he last shaved? Two days before? Three? He couldn’t remember. It didn’t much matter.

  Under the blanket next to his in the muddy trench, his loader, Corporal Jacques Fonsagrive, was also stirring. “Bonjour, mon vieux,” Barrès said. “Another lovely morning, n’est-ce pas?”

  Fonsagrive gave his opinion in one word: “Merde.” He always woke up surly—and stayed that way till he fell asleep again.

  “Any morning I wake up and I am still breathing is a lovely morning,” Barrès said. He pulled his water bottle off his belt and shook it. Half full, he judged: maybe a liter in there. He pulled out the cork and drank. Pinard ran down his throat. The rough red wine got his heart beating better than coffee had ever dreamt of doing.

  “Well, then, odds are there won’t be many more lovely mornings left in the world,” Fonsagrive said. “Fucking miracle we’ve had this many.” He scratched himself, then stuck a Gitane between his lips. His cheeks hollowed as he sucked in smoke. He coughed. “Christ on His cross, that’s worse than the chlorine the Boche shoots at us. What’s for breakfast?”

  “Ham and eggs and champagne would be nice, especially if an eighteen-year-old blonde with big jugs brought it to me,” Barrès answered. Fonsagrive swore at him. Unperturbed, he went on, “What I’ve got is singe. How about you?”

  “Singe here, too, and damn all else,” Fonsagrive said. “I was hoping you had something better.”

  “Don’t I wish,” Barrès said fervently. The company field kitchen—like about half the company field kitchens in the French Army—was unserviceable. Some capitalist well back of the line had made a profit. If the troops who tried to use the worthless stoves went hungry . . . well, c’est la guerre.

  Glumly, the two men opened tins of singe and stared down at the greasy, stringy beef. “Goddamn monkey meat,” Fonsagrive said. He started shoveling it into his face as fast as he could, as if he wanted to fuel his boiler while enduring as little of the taste as he could. Barrès followed suit. Even washed down with more swigs of pinard, the stuff was vile.

  He flung the empty tin out of the trench, almost as if it were a grenade. It didn’t clank when it came down, which probably meant it landed on a corpse. There were more corpses around than anything else, he often thought. The stench was all-pervasive, unbelievable, inescapable—a testament to what all flesh inevitably became. He wanted to delay the inevitable as long as he could.

  And how likely was that? He spat. He knew the answer too well. “Verdun,” he muttered under his breath. “World’s largest open-air cemetery.”

  Jacques Fonsagrive grunted. “Visitors always welcome,” he said, taking up where Barrès had left off. “Come on in yourself and see how you’d make out as a stiff.” He sounded like an advertising circular filled with a particular sort of repellent good humor.

  “Heh,” Barrès said—more acknowledgment that the words were supposed to be funny than an actual laugh.

  Cautiously, he reached up and plucked the cork from the muzzle of the Hotchkiss machine gun he and his partner served, then pulled away the oily rag that covered the machine gun’s cocking handle. He and Fonsagrive could get soaked and maintain their efficiency. The machine gun was more temperamental—and, in the grand scheme of things, more important to the French Army.

  Even more cautiously, he peered over the edge of the parapet. Ahead and over to the north lay what had been the Bois des Fosses. It was a wood no more, but a collection of matchsticks, toothpicks, and bits of kindling. Like gray ants in the distance, Germans moved there now.

  Sharp cracks behind him announced that the crews of a battery of 75s were awake, too. Shells screamed overhead. They slammed down in the middle of the wood, scattering the gray ants and sifting the remains of the timber one more step down toward sawdust.

  “Nice to see the artillery hitting the other side for a change,” Fonsagrive remarked. Like any infantryman who’d ever been under fire from his own guns, he had an ingrained disdain for cannons and the men who served them.

  Barrès said, “Those 75s are too close to bring their shells down on our heads.”

  “Merde,” Fonsagrive said again. “With those bastards, you never say they’re too close to do anything.”

  The sun rose higher. The day was going to be fine and mild, even warm. Barrès faced the prospect with something less than joy. Heat would make the stench worse. And it would bring out the flies, too. Already they were stirring, bluebottles and greenbottles and horseflies not too finicky to feast on human flesh as well.

  Thunder in the east made Barrès turn his head in that direction. Dominating the terrain there, Fort Douaumont was one of the keys to Verdun—and a key now in the hands of the Boche. Barrès neither knew nor cared how the fort had been lost. That it had been lost, though, mattered very much, for with its loss the Germans held the high ground along this whole stretch of front.

  French artillery was doing its best to make sure the Boche did not rest easy on the height
s. A gray haze continually hung about Fort Douaumont. Black shellbursts from a battery of 155s punctuated the haze. Below and around the fort, nothing at all grew. The ground was bare and brown and cratered, like astronomical photographs of the moon.

  More thunder boomed, this closer. German 77s and 105s were replying to the French guns harassing the Boche in the Bois des Fosses. The French field pieces defiantly barked back.

  Some of the German shells fell short, a few falling only a couple of hundred meters beyond the trench in which Barrès stood. He did not deign to look back at them, but remarked, “Back when the war was new, misses that close would have put my wind up.”

  “Back when the war was new, you were stupid,” Fonsagrive answered. “And if you’d got any smarter since, you wouldn’t be here.”

  That held too much truth to be comfortable. Sighing, Barrès said, “When the battalion has taken seventy-five percent casualties, they’ll pull us out of the line. That’s the rule.”

  “When the battalion has taken seventy-five percent casualties, odds are three to one you’ll be one of them,” his loader said. Fonsagrive punctuated the words with a perfect Gallic shrug. “Odds are three to one I’ll be another.”

  Barrès nodded. No one had shot him yet, though not for lack of effort. He didn’t know why not. His belief in luck had grown tenuous—had, to be honest, disappeared—from seeing so many comrades wounded and slain around him. He had no reason to believe he was in any way different from them. Yes, he’d lasted a little longer, but what did that mean? Not much.

  He said, “The one good thing about fighting is that then you don’t think about all the things that can happen to you. You just fight, and that’s all. It’s before and after that you think.”

  “There is no good thing about fighting.” Fonsagrive spoke with authority a general might have envied. “There are some that are bad, and some that are worse. If I kill the Boche, it is bad. If the Boche kills me, that, I assure you, is worse. And so I kill the Boche.”

  For the Boche, of course, the pans of that scale were reversed. The German trenches lay only a couple of hundred meters away. They had been French trenches till the field-gray tide lapped over them. The field-gray tide had briefly lapped over the trench in which Barrès and Fonsagrive stood, too, but a French counterattack had cleared it again. Some of the rotting corpses and chunks of corpses between the lines wore field-gray, others horizon bleu. In death, they all smelled the same.

  Behind their rusting barbed wire, the Germans were awake now, too. Here and there along the trench, riflemen started shooting up the slope toward the French position. Poilus returned the fire. Their rhythm was slightly slower than that of the Boche; they had to reload rounds one by one into the tubular magazines of their Lebels, where the Germans just slapped fresh five-round boxes onto the Mausers they used.

  Sighing, Barrès said, “There are quiet sections of the front, where for days at a time the two sides hardly shoot at each other.”

  “Not at Verdun,” Fonsagrive said. “No, not at Verdun.”

  “Tu a raison, malheureusement,” Barrès said. A moment later, he added, not unkindly, “Cochon.”

  And Fonsagrive was indeed right, however unfortunate that might have been. In front of Verdun, France and Germany were locked in an embrace with death—a Totentanz, a German word the French had come to understand full well. The town itself, the white walls and red-tiled roofs four or five kilometers back of the line, had almost ceased to matter. In the bit more than a month since the Germans swarmed out of their trenches on 21 February, the battle had taken on a life of its own. It was about itself, not about the town at all: about which side would have to admit the other was the stronger. And it was about how many lives forcing such an admission would cost.

  As if to underscore that point, a German Maxim gun snarled to life. The Boche was a good combat engineer; a concrete emplacement protected the machine gun from anything short of a direct hit from artillery. Sandbags protected Barrès’ Hotchkiss. He envied his counterparts in field-gray their snug nest.

  But, regardless of his envy, he had a job to do. “If they are feeling frisky, we had better pay them back in kind,” he said to Jacques Fonsagrive.

  The loader already had one of the Hotchkiss gun’s thirty-round metal strips of ammunition in his hands. He inserted it in the left side of the weapon. Barrès used the cocking handle to chamber the first round, then squeezed the trigger and traversed the machine gun to spray bullets along the German trenches like a man watering grass with a hose.

  As soon as the strip had gone all the way through the gun, Fonsagrive fed in another one. Barrès chambered the first round manually; the Hotchkiss gun, again, did the rest. It didn’t have quite the rate of fire of the German Maxim with its long, long belts of ammunition, but it was more than adequate for all ordinary purposes of slaughter, as a good many of the German dead could have attested.

  Barrès had no idea whether any individual bullet he fired hit any individual Boche. He didn’t much care. If he fired enough bullets, some of them would pierce German flesh, just as, if he played roulette long enough, the ball would sometimes land on zero, missing both red and black.

  Unfortunately, the same applied to that Maxim down the slope. A poilu perhaps fifty meters from Barrès let out an unearthly shriek and fell writhing to the bottom of the trench, clutching at his shoulder.

  Fonsagrive spat. “In most factories, it is an accident when someone is hurt—an accident that causes work to stop. What we make in this factory is death, and when someone is hurt it is but a death imperfectly manufactured. I hope the Boche who fired that round gets a reprimand for falling down on the job.”

  One more casualty, Barrès thought as a couple of men helped the wounded soldier up a zigzagging communications trench toward a medical station. One more casualty that is neither Jacques nor I. One casualty closer to the three-quarters who have to be shot or blown up before they take this battalion out of the line. That was a revoltingly cold-blooded way to look at a man’s agony and probably mutilation. He knew as much. Being able to help it was something else again.

  He did his best to return the disfavor to the Boche. Methodical as any factory worker, Fonsagrive fed strip after strip of bullets into the Hotchkiss gun. Barrès knew from long experience just how hard to tap the weapon to make the muzzle swing four or five centimeters on its arc of death. Had the Germans come out of their trench, they would not have lived to reach his.

  Presently, the donut-shaped iron radiating fins at the base of the barrel began to glow a dull red. Over in the trench the Boche held, the mirror image of his own, the water in the cooling jacket surrounding the Maxim gun’s barrel would be boiling. The Germans could brew coffee or tea with the hot water. All Barrès could do was remember not to touch those iron fins.

  After a while, the German machine gun fell silent, though rifles kept on barking. Barrès turned to Fonsagrive and asked, “Have we got any of that newspaper left?”

  “I think so,” the loader answered. His words seemed to come from far away; Barrès’ hearing took a while to return to even a semblance of its former self after a spell of firing. Fonsagrive rummaged. “No newspaper, but we’ve got this.” He held out a copy of L’Illustration.

  “It will do,” Barrès said. Taking the magazine, he scrambled up out of the trench and into a shell hole right behind it. A couple of bullets whipped past him, but neither came very near; he’d had much closer calls. He unbuttoned his fly to piss, then yanked down his pants and squatted in a spot that wasn’t noticeably more noisome than any other. In some stretches of the line, trenches had latrine areas soldiers were supposed to use. The trenches around Verdun had been shelled and countershelled, taken and retaken, so many times, they were hard to tell from the shell holes in front of and behind them.

  As Barrès did his business, he glanced at an article about the fighting in which he was engaged. He needed only a couple of sentences to be sure the writer had never come within a hundred kilo
meters of Verdun or, very likely, any other part of the front. Confident hope rings a carillon of bells in our hearts, the fellow declared.

  “I know what hope would ring a carillon of bells in my heart, salaud,” Barrès muttered: “the hope of trading places with you.”

  Slowly and deliberately, he tore that page from the copy of L’Illustration and used it for the purpose for which he had requested the magazines of Fonsagrive. Then he used another page, too; like a lot of the men on both sides here, he had a touch of dysentery. A lot of men had more than a touch.

  He set his pants to rights and then, clutching the magazine, dove back into the trench. He drew more fire this time, as he’d known he would. “The Boche would sooner assassinate a man answering a call of nature than do battle when both sides have weapons at hand,” he said.

  “So would I,” Fonsagrive replied. “The pigdogs”—he liked the feel of the German Schweinhund—“are just as dead that way, and they can’t shoot back at me.”

  Barrès thought it over. “It could be that you have reason,” he said at last.

  “And it could be that all the world has gone mad, and that reason is as dead as all the other corpses in front of us in no-man’s-land,” Fonsagrive said. “That, I think, is more likely. If there were a God, these would be the last days.”

  “I was, once, a good Catholic,” Barrès said. “I went to Mass. I took communion. I confessed my sins.” He scratched his head. Something popped wetly under his fingernail. “I wonder where the man who did those things has gone. The man I am now . . . all that man wants to do is to kill the Boche and to keep the Boche from killing him.”